


the coat you wear

by ladyzanra



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Episode Tag, Loneliness, M/M, Mark of Cain, Post-Episode: s09e18 Meta Fiction, Season/Series 09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-24
Updated: 2014-04-24
Packaged: 2018-01-19 17:30:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1478077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyzanra/pseuds/ladyzanra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He goes back to his room before fully accepting that he isn't going to go after Dean. Something in him still tugs at the fabric of this design. But he's made his choice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the coat you wear

**Author's Note:**

> You have no idea how many times I've watched the ending montage to Meta Fiction. //face in hands//

The Impala is the only sound Cas hears as it drives away.  
  
He stands statue-still in the parking lot for several minutes or maybe a half hour. Beneath the layer of foreign grace which he now avoids using unless he absolutely has to, he is half anger, half regret. He goes back to his room before fully accepting that he isn't going to go after Dean. Something in him still tugs at the fabric of this design. But he's made his choice. As has Dean.  
  
If he still had working wings, it would be of no consequence. He could go after Dean without having to choose, could be back within hours. He could go both ways. But his wings are useless.  
  
He doesn't feel tired but his body does. Like a red star, a chaotic lashing of color and gas at the edges, unstable, dry and hot and crackling.  
  
He doesn't think about how parts of him have begun to go black inside, burnt out like an old light bulb. He notices that his phone is blinking and he picks it up with a little rush of hope.  
  
 _6 missed calls from Dean_  
  
He thumbs through them and his heart sinks. They're all from hours ago.  
  
They still surprise him. Either Dean was trying to get a hold of Cas when Cas had been captured by Metatron, or Dean was trying to reach out to him. Cas knows Dean had been alone with Gadreel for some time. Dean's dangerous enough on his _own_ when he's angry, but now he has the mark's curse pumping through his veins. Dean's not completely submerged, not yet. If he went too far – he might surface, might catch himself. Might call.  
  
Dean might still want to talk. Or Cas may have damaged those chances just now in the parking lot.  
  
He had not behaved calmly.  
  
The missed calls stay in the log crossing over from the past to the present like the lights from stars that have long since burned away. Before Cas had lost his own grace, he had been able to look up at the heavens from the perspective of earth and see all the stars as they were, effortlessly see into the vastness of the celestial sphere. Now he knows what it's like to see them only by the light they leave behind, to look up and see only glimmering echoes where they used to be.  
  
He knows now that starlight is precious but also sad.  
  
His motel room presses silence into every crevice of him. He looks around the empty room as if there's something there to find. Frowns at himself, because of course there isn't.  
  
He turns around and rips the tracking board off of the motel room wall and opens his bag.  
  
Blood, griffin feathers, bones of a fairy.  
  
Metatron has provided him with the ingredients, somehow, just as Castiel thought he would.  
  
Cas takes off his coat and rolls up his sleeves.  
  
The sigil glows for hours, straight into the dawn, before Cas finally stands again and puts his coat back on. The phone is a comforting, private weight in his pocket. He stares at the sigil a little while longer and then squares his shoulders. Walks out into the sun.  
  
  
–

 

He almost texts Dean before dialing Sam's number instead.  
  
“Cas?” Sam's voice is muffled. “What's up, is something wrong?”  
  
“No. Did I wake you?”  
  
“Don't worry about it,” Sam sleepily waves it off. “Haven't heard from you in a few days.”  
  
“I've been busy. I wanted to call sooner but I couldn't seem to find the time.”  
  
It's true. Growing an army, recruiting, structuring it, giving out ranks, assigning scouts and spies, is just as time consuming as Castiel remembers it being. Maybe more so. It's different on earth, more crowded and hectic on the ground. His 'army of rebels' has been growing very quickly. Cas hasn't had a half hour's break from it all in the past three days. He's only managed to steal away now because Hannah finally told him he looked worn out and Cas is not nearly as prideful as he once was. Now he's sitting in the corner of the warehouse while Hannah covers for him.  
  
“Okay,” says Sam.  
  
“Are you alone?”  
  
“Sort of. Dean was here, but he's gone out.” Cas gathers they're on the road, in a motel room somewhere. “He's been doing that lately.”  
  
Cas lowers his voice. “How is he?”  
  
A pause. “Well. Two nights ago he almost beheaded someone who _wasn't_ the vampire, and then yesterday he got into a brawl at a bar over literally nothing.” Sam sighs. “Not great.”  
  
“But you were able to stop him?” Cas asks.  
  
“The first time, yeah. Second time, no.”  
  
Cas is frustrated that he wasn't there to see these instances himself.  
  
“It's like he goes into this trance, like he's in another world--”  
  
“It's pure rage,” Castiel says.  
  
Dean's soul has always hungered for it. Now he has an unlimited supply of it to tap into, at any given time.  
  
“All I know is we better find Abaddon soon,” Sam says. “Cas. What has he done to himself? What does the Mark of Cain _do_? You've gotta know.”  
  
“Nothing good." Cas glares at the floor.  
  
Sam starts to express his discontent with Cas's vague answer when he's interrupted by the sound of a door opening. A moment later, he hangs up.  
  
Cas sits there and just stares at his phone. He starts to get up when it rings. He sits back down.  
  
Answers it and puts it to his ear and waits in wary silence.  
  
“Man, I knew it,” Dean says, and for a split second, Cas doesn't catch the bitterness in his voice. “You got Sam keeping tabs on me, sneaking around behind my back?” Dean snarls.  
  
Cas closes his eyes. He's not sure why he feels guilty; Dean hasn't been making this easy for him. “Dean. We're worried about you.”  
  
“Okay. Well, worry about this." Dean hangs up.

  
–  
  
  
Dean calls a day later, while Cas is in a meeting with his seconds in command. Cas's pocket buzzes and at first he thinks it's Sam. He thinks maybe something has gone wrong. He wraps up the meeting as quickly as possible. But then Hannah and Rastiel have questions, and the answers take some explaining. By the time he's alone outside, his back to the building, half in the shade and half out of it, ten minutes have passed since he missed the call.  
  
Which, he sees now, was from Dean.  
  
He's frustrated that he tried to get away quickly and still took so long. The army has become so big that it now demands nearly his full attention. That thought makes him weary even beneath the constant strain of the ailing grace.  
  
He dials back.  
  
“Dean,” he says. And then he's not sure what else he can say that won't incite Dean somehow or send him back into the shadows.  
  
“Cas. You busy?” To Cas's surprise, there's more uncertainty than hostility in Dean's voice.  
  
“What is it?”  
  
“I'm sorry about hanging up on you last night. You know I don't take well to deception and then... I dunno, man,” his voice almost cracks, and at least in this moment, it's really him, it's Dean, “I was just so angry. I couldn't.”  
  
Cas feels an ache in his chest, sudden, deep. “I know. It's all right. Well, it _isn't_ all right. But I understand.”  
  
The silence is uncertain.  
  
“What did you tell Sam about it?” asks Dean. “About the mark?”  
  
“Nothing.”  
  
“What is it?” Dean asks. “What color's the coffin this time?”  
  
Cas grits his teeth at the return of Dean's nonchalance. “Did Cain tell you it was a curse?”  
  
“Uh,” Dean sounds like he shrugs. “Maybe.”  
  
“There is no 'coffin',” Cas tells him. “You will live forever.”  
  
“Oh,” Dean says. “Uh.” He almost maybe _laughs_. “That supposed to be a curse? Because it sounds like a--”  
  
“You will live alone.”  
  
Dean stops.  
  
“Your insatiable lust for destruction and violence and murder will cleave you from everything you hold dear, everyone you love. And you won't care. You'll become worse than a vengeful spirit, worse than a demon.”  
  
“Cas, I know you're just trying to be nice,” Dean says, tone flat, “but you don't have to sugar coat it.”  
  
“You'll be alone forever,” Cas finishes brutally.  
  
That seems to do something, keep the doors from completely closing. At least, Dean has no flippant reply to it.  
  
“What are you up to?” Dean changes the subject. “How're you doing?”  
  
No one has asked Cas this since Dean did last, in the parking lot. It pries something loose in Cas's chest.  
  
He wants to tell Dean about the loneliness of being a leader. Wants to tell him about all the difficulties, all the stress, all the questions they ask him, all the decisions he is forced to make when still in doubt. Wants to tell Dean how _tired_ he is.  
  
He swallows and says painfully, “Nothing new to report. I haven't found anything yet.”  
  
“Yeah? Haven't run into Metatron again, have you?”  
  
“No. I haven't run into anyone.”  
  
The door next to Cas bursts open and then he has a terrified Hannah staring at him. It shouldn't make him jump, but it does, and then he recovers and immediately ends the call in his hand.  
  
“Castiel, you must come quickly,” her eyes are wild with fear and her hair is half in her face. “Ruth and Eriel have returned with grave injuries. And they say Jathaniel has been killed.”  
  
Cas looks at her in alarm, his heart pounding. "What?" Has it begun already? “Hannah, show me.” She's trembling as she turns around. Castiel takes hold of her wrist and sends grace through her to calm her down, until a pang in his chest, a hot scraping sensation along the shell of himself, makes him stop.  
  
He doesn't realize until his hand shouts "CAS!" that the line between him and Dean is actually still open.  
  
He ends the call for real and drops the phone into his pocket, shocked but putting it out of his mind as he approaches the huddle of frantic angels ahead.  
  
It's as bad as he feared.  
  
Ruth doesn't last the night. He is by her side when the light glows and fades from her eyes and mouth, no outline of charred wings spanning the warehouse floor to mark her death as angelic.  
  
Dean texts and calls him in the days following, but Cas misses half of them and doesn't answer the rest.  
  
By the fourth day, Dean stops trying.  
  
  
–  
  
  
They run into each other accidentally in Crystal Falls, Michigan.  
  
Sam and Dean are there because there have been reports of strange disturbances and murders and they think Abaddon and her soulless followers are behind it. Cas and about twenty of his rebels are there because the murders sound more like angel slaughterings to them, which would mean Metatron and Gadreel.  
  
They crash into each other in an abandoned storage building, neither party finding what it came for, the ends of their quests evaporating in front of them.  
  
Dean locks eyes with Castiel from across the room. He looks confused, adrenaline from the hunt waning. Then his jaw sets.

 "Cas," his mouth twists unpleasantly around the name. "Hey. Long time no see. Who're your buddies? What are they, your army?"

 Cas can't look Dean in the eye. Or Sam, for that matter. "Yes," he tells the concrete, "actually. They are."

 No one speaks. Sam and the angels at Castiel's back may as well have turned to stone. Cas glances at Dean.

 "You have an army now," Dean reiterates, not furrowing his brow in disbelief, but staring at Cas with unsettingly cold and emotionless eyes. It's worse. He looks at the angels. Then he looks Cas over head to toe.

 "Can we talk alone," he decides, his face seeming to soften just a fraction.

 Cas tells his angels to pick up the thread of the other lead they had, which will send them south. They nod obediently and leave. When Cas turns around again Dean is already heading out the door. He follows him, giving Sam an apologetic but cowardly silent look as he passes. Sam's expression is one mainly of disappointment.

 "Somethin' you wanna say?" Dean asks, once they reach the copse at the back of the warehouse. The dusk catches in the trees, a pink glow sombering into purple; they won't have light for much longer, the daylight sliding to the other hemisphere. Dean turns around slowly. Cas finds Dean's minimum of movements and gestures vaguely unnerving.

 The anger on Dean's face, compact and strangely derisive, coupled with his question, makes Castiel suddenly indignant. As if Cas has no good reasons for keeping any of this a secret, as if the past several weeks haven't been wearing down at him nonstop like water over rock.

 Cas inhales. "Not particularly."

 He is ashamed of himself. Dean is not himself. Cas is only letting himself get ruffled by the curse itself, in the form of Dean. And he's making it worse. All the aches in his body sink deeper and make him feel even heavier.

 Dean smirks at the grass like this is exactly how he'd expected the conversation to go.

 "So what's the plan? You just gonna take all your pals and knock on Metatron's front door?"

No. That's not the plan.

That's only what Metatron needs to _think_ is the plan. Scripts are not omniscient. Castiel has seen it in the books and stories Metatron so painfully implanted in his head and he has experienced it in the private walls of his own heart: the script is not all there is. There is always room for ambiguity and multiple interpretations. For a breath of free will. So he's giving Metatron the script Metatron wants, while Metatron watches his every move, and the _real_ plan is to figure out what to really do in between the lines.

Lately Cas has been feeling like those lines have been closing in on him, like he is looking through them as if they were prison cell bars. He's been disappearing beneath the plot. He hasn't made much progress looking for the so-called stairway to Heaven, especially when he can't directly mention it to anyone who might help him. And angels from his flock have been dying, just as Metatron forecasted they would. Their blood is on his hands, no matter how genuinely he has been trying to keep them all safe and alive. Each death tears at him. He knew all of them by name.

He's been questioning his decision more and more. It's beginning to feel like Crowley all over again, like thinking himself smart enough to outsmart Metatron is just his fatal pride rearing its ugly head, again. Cas is horrified at the prospect.

Cas wishes he could tell Dean any of this. Cas is trying to do the right thing and no one knows. Dean doesn't know.

"Yes," Cas says, "That's the plan." Even barring the necessary secrecy, Cas would only have this angry, masked Dean to confide in. Dean's full of dead spots now, like spotty wi-fi. Loneliness catches in Cas's chest like a sort of cold fire. "I'm," Cas adds, and prepares himself for the quote, which sits awkwardly on his tongue, "storming the castle."

Perhaps if he talks like Dean does, he can get through to him somehow.

Dean eyes him. "You think it will work?" voice toneless.

"It would take a miracle," Cas says.

Dean blinks at him, as if confused.

"It's a good thing miracles are my specialty, as an angel," Cas adds.

Maybe the words themselves are poison; maybe Metatron is playing with him, reminding him of the time he refused Metatron's offer for more grace. A sharp, searing pain lashes through Cas's chest and shoulders, stabs and sparks all the way up to his temples. He tenses and curls in on himself a little, bringing a hand to his forehead.

"You all right?" Dean asks. Though without making a move to help Cas.

"Yeah, I'm just tired."

Dean is staring at the sleeve of Cas's coat. It's torn in several places and sports a blood stain. And there's a cut across the back of Cas's hand which Cas has not healed.

"Cas," Dean growls, and there is concern in Dean's voice suddenly, there is _Dean_ , "What's wrong with your grace?"

Cas looks at Dean in the fading light.

"It's burning me out."

Dean's eyes widen, the green glittering in fear. He's woken up.

Cas's chest shudders and he swallows.

"Well then, you gotta let it go. You gotta get rid of it!"

"I can't."

"Forget about the army," Dean barks, "forget about Metatron--"

"Dean, I mean I can't. It's a part of me like a," Cas looks around, "a transplanted organ. I can't just rip it out now."

Dean looks lost. His mouth goes slack. He stares at the grass. "Shit," in a small voice. When he looks up the lines on his face are somewhat taut again. "Did you know this was gonna happen?"

"I figured there was a reason it was taboo."

Dean lowers his eyes again.

"I thought it was me." His voice is strangely quiet, dead. "I thought you seemed different because of the Mark. It makes everything different. Colors, tastes, smells." There's something cold and not-right about him again. "I thought it was because I'm cursed."

Cas restrains himself from palming Dean's face and lifting his chin up, lifting his gaze out of the shadows. "Hey. You have a curse _in_ you, but you are still _you_ ," Cas insists sharply. His heart is pounding. "Did you hear me?"

"Would rather it had been me," Dean continues, as if he hadn't.

Cas digs his fingers into his palms, grinds his teeth together. Because this is Dean being so down on himself on top of being so far away and fading in and out like a bad signal, of having so low an opinion of himself after everything he's been through and all the good he's done and. Cas is _so_ tired. Cas hesitates for a moment and then fists his hands in Dean's jacket and kisses him, hard, on the mouth.

He's vaguely aware that this is too aggressive, that this is a risk. He is all hot breath and desperate sounds against Dean's lips, which barely respond, he crashes against Dean's rock stillness like a wave against a cliff edge, fingers tightening in the fabric, mouth greedy, struggling for purchase.

And Dean doesn't move and it turns Cas into even more of an animal.

But Dean doesn't step back. He doesn't shove Cas away.

When Cas pulls away himself, finally, breathless, Dean is staring at him. Like at some point he lost himself again, slipped under the darkness. Despite everything Cas had tried to show him. Dean just has this look of vague cold curiosity on his face.  
  
Then he says "We screwed up. Didn't we."

Not flippant. Not despairingly. Just numb. Observational.

Cas braves looking as deep into Dean's eyes as he can and says urgently, his vision clouding, "There is always hope."

It's more _Lord of the Rings_ than Cas, but hey, maybe it has a better chance of making an impact that way.

The purple shadows are turning grey. Cas has to return to his angels in case they do find what they're looking for, and who knows how long Sam's been waiting for his brother to resume their own hunt. There are other people who need them, other lives at stake.

Cas is turning back toward the warehouse when Dean tugs on his coat sleeve.

Cas stares at Dean's fingers digging into the frayed fabric. He looks slowly up at Dean's face.

Dean's eyes glimmer ruefully at him, a sudden light piercing through the curse that snakes around him.

Cas still sees it, even after Dean lets his hand drop and his expression goes dark and unfeeling again. Continues to see it as Dean walks past him, back toward the Impala, and disappears without a word.  
  
In fact, it seems brighter and more real than the present world of shadows.


End file.
